A blog about individual and community development using new information and communication technologies, especially e-learning, open educational resources, open source, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking, semantic web and other social software.

2016-08-29

Last week Google released another round of updates to their Expeditions program. Expeditions is the virtual reality program that lets students experience immersive views of more than 200 places including the International Space Station, coral reefs, the Taj Mahal, and the White House.

Currently, to experience Expeditions you must have a Google Cardboard viewer and a supported Android device. According to last week's Google for Education blog post, soon you will be able to experience Expeditions on iPads. On your iPad you will be able to use full screen mode to view the Expeditions virtual field trips.

Picking the right music or sound effects can have a drastic influence on how we react to a scene in a video. Here are some places that you and your students can find free sound effects and music to download and use in video projects.

2016-08-18

Digital portfolios are something that are really starting to take off in schools. There are different software programs that will make "portfolios" easy to share, yet do we truly embrace the power that a digital portfolio can bring into our schools? Since it is "digital", we need to go beyond a portfolio that only represents one year of learning, but can show the progression over time.

While the potential is great, in short a QR Code is a physical link that can be scanned by smartphones or tablets in mobile learning circumstances. The following list from listly user Marianna Talei offers a huge variety of QR resources, from QR code generators to attaching images and hosting QR code treasure hunts.

2016-08-16

Earlier this week, Oxford's Bodleian Library announced that it had digitized a 550 year old copy of the Gutenberg Bible along with a number of other ancient bibles, some of them quite beautiful. Not to be outdone, the British Library came out with its own announcement on Thursday:

2016-08-11

Learners' use of digital tools and other technology to support their learning in our K-12 systems continues to be sporadic and often not observed despite the proliferation of use outside of school. Based on an analysis of three years of direct classroom observations in K-12 schools across 39 states and 11 countries, AdvancED found there are still relatively few classrooms in which the use of digital tools and technology is a regular part of a student's school experience. In more than half (52.7 percent) of classrooms direct observations show no evidence students are using technology to gather, evaluate, or use information for learning; two-thirds of classrooms show no evidence of students using technology to solve problems, conduct research, or to work collaboratively.

Trained and certified observers conduct classroom observations as a part of AdvancED's continuous improvement process which could include STEM Certification, accreditation, readiness and/or diagnostic review. Each observation lasts a minimum of 20 minutes during which observers use the learner-centric eProve™ Effective Learning Environments Observation Tool® (eleot®) to gather data focused on the activities learners are engaged in, their discussions and interactions, resources they are using for learning, their behaviors and dispositions during the learning process, etc. Observers rate each of the 30 eleot items on a four-point scale where 4 = Very Evident, 3 = Evident, 2 = Somewhat Evident and 1 = Not Observed